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Gov. Kasich Pretends Obamacare is Not Obamacare

Ohio Governor John Kasich is now insisting the Obamacare Medicaid expansion “is not about Obamacare,” in an attempt to message his fight for new deficit spending around conservative opposition and months of bad news about President Obama’s unpopular 2010 health law.

Expanding Medicaid – an ineffective entitlement program that already consumes nearly half of Ohio’s budget – to able-bodied childless adults under the age of 65 is a key component of Obamacare, or the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA).

“Medicaid expansion is no different than the current Medicaid program, and to try to tie Medicaid to Obamacare, I don’t see the connection,” Gov. Kasich told reporter Joe Vardon last week.

“I mean it may have been provided in there, but it was John Roberts, the Republican chief justice appointed by President (George W.) Bush, who said states can have the option to extend their Medicaid coverage,” Gov. Kasich added in his interview with Vardon.

Gov. Kasich has been making similarly ridiculous statements for months. In a February 6 RedState post, he wrote that expanding Medicaid as called for in Obamacare would “limit further damage from Obamacare.”

Kasich was far more concerned about entitlement spending, bureaucracy, and the national debt before bigger government meant reelection support from the Ohio Hospital Association and other lobbyists looking for more taxpayer money.

Responding to Obamacare’s passage, on March 22, 2010 Kasich wrote, “In the end, the federal government will just rack up higher deficits and go deeper in debt, leaving future generations to pick up the tab.”

“Ohio government spending will go up also, adding to an already bleak budget picture,” candidate Kasich warned. “Instead of letting states develop innovative solutions to their respective challenges, new federal mandates will require more Medicaid spending and stick states with large and unsustainable costs.”

“Government shouldn’t be making promises it can’t keep – especially when it’s more than $14.5 trillion in the hole,” Governor Kasich said on August 20, 2011, when the federal government was in a pit of debt $2.2 trillion shallower than it is today.

Note: This is part two of a three part series on ObamaCare.
How should we understand the ugly polling numbers for ObamaCare? It may be helpful to consider various groups of Americans in order to understand what they could find objectionable in ObamaCare.

Note: This is part one of a three part series on ObamaCare.President Obama recently unveiled his new media strategy of “owning” ObamaCare. He began with a Twitter campaign that urged supporters to list the benefits they plan to receive under the health care law while using the tag “#ILikeObamaCare”. Unfortunately for the president, this tag was immediately co-opted by sarcastic conservatives who used it while criticizing ObamaCare.

This week, a broad coalition of citizen groups sent two powerful messages to Congress with the following pair of letters, which urge the immediate repeal of ObamaCare's health care rationing board, better known as IPAB.

It’s clear that the public supports repealing ObamaCare, but here at FreedomWorks, we believe that it needs to repealed and replaced.
Representative Paul Broun, M.D. (R-GA) has introduced an exciting new ObamaCare “repeal and replace” bill called the Patient OPTION (Offering Patients True Individualized Options) Act (H.R. 4224).

Want to follow the Supreme Court's deliberations on the historic ObamaCare case (HHS v. Florida) as it unfolds? Mark your calendar!
The Court will hear oral arguments on Monday, March 26, through Wednesday, March 28.

As one of our million-plus FreedomWorks members nationwide, I urge you to contact your representative and ask him or her to cosponsor H.R. 4160, the State Health Flexibility Act. Introduced by Rep. Todd Rokita (R-IN), the bill would block grant Medicaid and S-CHIP to the states. The current Medicaid system is based on top-down regulatory controls from Washington. State governments shoulder roughly half of Medicaid’s annual costs but they have virtually no say on how it is run.